Informed Seattle: Collective Sensemaking Infrastructure with AI Supported Legislative Plain Text Summaries
Problem
Democratic participation is unevenly distributed as a result of disparities in access to civic information.
Local governments routinely make decisions that affect housing affordability, transportation, public safety, climate resilience, disability services, childcare, and public health. Although these decisions are officially public, they are rarely comprehensible to those most affected.
Residents with limited resources—including working parents, renters, immigrants, individuals with disabilities, young adults, and those unfamiliar with legal or bureaucratic language—often lack the time or expertise required to interpret legislation before decisions are made.
As a result, public participation disproportionately represents organizations and individuals who already possess the time, knowledge, and relationships necessary to navigate government processes. This dynamic perpetuates a cycle in which those most affected by policy are least represented in its design.
The primary challenge is not apathy.
Instead, the issue arises from deficiencies in civic information infrastructure.
Solution
Informed Seattle develops civic information infrastructure intended to make government processes understandable before decisions are finalized.
The project translates complex Seattle City Council legislation into community-reviewed, plain-language summaries tailored to the interests and needs of different communities. Summaries are generated by agent systems whose evaluation criteria reflect each community’s expressed priorities. This approach enables communities to plan, implement, and verify the effectiveness of their own legislative summary agents. Community governance of these agents allows residents to select agent objectives, incorporate more nuanced evaluation criteria when summary outputs are biased, determine what should not be modeled, interpret policy implications, and identify inaccuracies in summaries.
Rather than directing residents on what to think, the project provides timely, accessible information that enables them to understand proposed policies and determine whether and how to participate.
The long-term vision extends beyond information dissemination:
- Learn: Make legislation understandable.
- Connect: Help residents share their perspective and see the perspectives of others.
- Engage: Support meaningful participation through existing democratic channels.
Currently, we are focused on building and testing the Learn layer, as well-informed participation begins with understanding.
Impact
The intended impact is not limited to improved communication.
It is to achieve more equitable participation in civic decision-making.
By lowering barriers to understanding legislation, Informed Seattle seeks to make civic participation more equitable.
- Increase participation among residents who have historically been excluded from policy conversations.
- Shift civic engagement from reactive advocacy following finalized decisions to well-informed participation during the decision-making process.
- Enable governments to receive input from a broader and more representative cross-section of the communities they serve.
- Foster public confidence through transparency by making government processes more understandable and accountable.
- Strengthen democratic institutions by enabling participation without requiring specialized expertise in legislative processes.
Ultimately, the project supports at-risk groups by addressing one of the most persistent barriers to civic power: unequal access to comprehensible information.